The Devils (1971) – Cinematography by David Watkin

David Watkin brings his bounced and diffused light to anamorphic widescreen, giving monumental scale to Ken Russell’s provocative world.

The Film

Adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s play The Devils, the film draws on historical events in seventeenth-century France. Cardinal Richelieu, in his pursuit of power, seeks to dismantle the country’s fortified cities. Opposing him is Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), a priest whose conduct is far from exemplary. His failings provide ammunition against him when it becomes known that the prioress of the convent in Loudun (Vanessa Redgrave) has fallen in love with him.

“The Devils” is marked by the excess familiar from Ken Russell’s cinema, but above all by its provocative subject matter and its uninhibited depiction of nudity, sexual desire, intercourse and even masturbation among members of the clergy. This provoked fierce controversy and led to the censorship of several scenes.¹ Setting that controversy aside, “The Devils” is an uneven film, as flawed as it is ambitious, despite Reed’s commanding performance and the boldness of Russell’s approach.

The Cinematographer

British cinematographer David Watkin, BSC, photographed the film in the first of his two collaborations with Russell. Watkin is one of the most important figures in cinematography in the second half of the twentieth century. He came from documentary filmmaking at British Transport Films and, from the beginning of his feature career, was closely associated with Richard Lester, making a decisive contribution to the freshness and spontaneity of his films. A regular collaborator of Tony Richardson as well, Watkin was one of the pioneers of bounced and diffused lighting as an alternative to the traditional approach to color cinematography that still prevailed in the 1960s. This earned him numerous enemies and a certain notoriety: many technicians and directors found his methods unorthodox, while producers were confronted with the considerable expense of his innovations. Yet because Watkin always sought a natural, uncomplicated look, he generally maintained a low profile. That changed when he won the Oscar for “Out of Africa” (Sydney Pollack, 1985), crediting his second unit for the beautiful landscapes they had photographed for him.

Watkin is also famous for his aversion to anamorphic widescreen, which he regarded as an optical catastrophe. Part of his approach involved substantial overexposure of the negative, often requiring very wide apertures. Under those conditions, anamorphic lenses introduced distortions and aberrations that he apparently detested. Although he shot several films in the format, including “The Devils,” he always tried to avoid it — even though his anamorphic work is, to my mind, more interesting than his major achievements in spherical formats.

Visual Style Analysis

In its lighting, “The Devils” is pure David Watkin. Derek Jarman’s extraordinary sets, with their stylized and almost timeless character, are central to the effect. Their pale tiled surfaces catch and redistribute the light, while high windows and roof openings give it a convincing architectural motivation. Watkin combines an enormous amount of bounced arc light with light directed through diffusion, the latter falling more selectively on particular areas of the sets. The large sources and bounce surfaces produce a soft quality of illumination, while the placement of the light preserves strong differences between bright architectural surfaces, darker figures and areas of shadow. The result is a highly expressive image that remains rooted in a natural-looking approach.

Watkin’s inventiveness is such that, at certain moments, he even sends light through church stained-glass windows and projects it onto the actors, particularly in the final sequences. Although he liked to overexpose heavily to achieve these effects, much of the interior work in “The Devils” appears to have been photographed at around T4.0, perhaps stopping down a further stop for the exteriors. As so often in his work, those exteriors seem to dispense with supplementary artificial lighting, relying instead on overexposure and backlight.

But “The Devils” is not only about Watkin’s lighting. However excessive the action on screen may be, Russell’s staging is exceptional for much of the running time. His widescreen compositions are richly organized, making superb use of the format’s width to place and distribute the actors across the frame. The tiled chapel, with its ranks of black-and-white habits, is a particularly clear example of how architecture and costume structure the image. Russell also excels at expansive crane moves, tracking shots and dolly moves. These required camera operator Ronnie Taylor, BSC — later an Oscar-winning cinematographer himself — to recompose the frame with every change in camera position.

ON FILM & DIGITAL
© Ignacio Aguilar, 2013. Revised in 2026.

This article is part of ON FILM & DIGITAL’s English-language cinematography reviews and essays.

These texts are not plot summaries or general film reviews, but cinematography-focused essays written from the perspective of a working cinematographer.

The Author

Ignacio Aguilar, AEC is a cinematographer / director of photography based in Madrid, Spain. His work spans feature films, television, commercials and technical writing on cinematography, with experience in digital cinema, 16mm and 35mm film, anamorphic lenses, large-format digital capture, lens testing and film-based workflows.

He is a member of the Spanish Society of Cinematographers (AEC) and the Spanish Academy of Cinema, a Sony I.C.E. Certified Expert and a Cooke SP3 ambassador. His writing has appeared in American Cinematographer and Camera & Light, and ON FILM & DIGITAL gathers his bilingual essays, technical guides and cinematography reviews.

For professional work, collaborations, lectures, workshops or cinematography consulting, visit his professional biography, selected works or contact page.

The Spanish-language archive is available at ON FILM & DIGITAL.